Chekalina’s bloggers, suspected of non-payment of taxes for 300 million rubles, commented on their criminal case.
The husband of a millionaire Instagram blogger (Instagram is blocked in the Russian Federation, owned by Meta, a recognized extremist organization) Lerchek Artem Chekalin recorded a video in which he said that they “didn’t run away from Russia, didn’t leave for a long time, they didn’t say bad words.” They intend to repay the tax debt in the near future, he said.
The searches in the house of Valeria Chekalina became known the day before. Then the family found jewelry, ten passports and 8 kilograms of gold. The blogger’s husband stated that he received the ingots against the frozen dollar assets:
“We employ 250 people, these are jobs. Why do we pay a lot of taxes? Well, here is the situation. Thank you for not planting for the first time, so we will try to pay everything off and forget this whole story. From what they saw on the news about ten passports. We have five family members, each with two passports – that’s ten passports. About 8 kilograms of gold – it was in VTB Bank that they froze my money, and instead of dollars they gave me gold. That’s where the gold comes from.”
Blogger Lerchek is suspected of tax evasion: Chekalina was registered as an individual entrepreneur with an income limit of up to 150 million a year. According to investigators, in order not to lose the right to a simplified taxation system, she split up her business and transferred money to the accounts of relatives and close people. Lerchek alone brought in about 3 billion rubles last year.
Does the version about frozen assets and 8 kilograms of gold issued by the bank seem real? Maxim Osadchiy, Head of the Analytical Department of the Corporate Finance Bank, comments:
“That’s just the situation with these 8 kilograms of gold does not raise big questions. I think that everything was done legally by the bank, as far as I understand, this is VTB. That is, we are talking about the following: apparently, Chekalin or his wife, on February 24 last year, owned currency worth more than 10 thousand dollars, respectively, it was, as it were, semi-frozen. That is, it was possible to withdraw in rubles, that is, convert into rubles and withdraw, but not directly in the currency. Accordingly, a very simple operation – the currency from the deposit is sold, gold is bought for it, these 8 kilograms of gold are about 36 million rubles at current prices. Yes, and in the volume of the Chekalins’ business, this amount is not very significant, I don’t know why the public was so interested in it. The businesses that the Chekalins were engaged in are standard, although it’s not entirely politically correct to say this, but infogypsy, few people get anything, but they managed to get money in large volumes. Well, in the context of the growing budget deficit, apparently, the tax authorities have stepped up and dealt with these influencers and so on.
The video message was also recorded by Valeria Chekalina herself. In stories, she noted that over the past three years, her family has paid 1.5 billion rubles in taxes. And she called the debt of 300 million her mistake, which one must be able to admit.
The family is confident that the case will end with the repayment of debts. Meanwhile, for the duration of the investigation, the Chekalins are under house arrest. The maximum term they can face is three years in prison.